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For bugs in Firefox Desktop, the Mozilla Foundation's web browser. For Firefox user interface issues in menus, bookmarks, location bar, and preferences. Many Firefox bugs will either be filed here or in the Core product. Bugs for developer tools (F12) should be filed in the DevTools product. (more info)

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User Story

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100915 Firefox/4.0b7pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100915 Firefox/4.0b7pre
This is from Bug 587908 Comment 43
If you:
* Stop mousing and your cursor is over a link
* Load a page and your cursor happens to e over a link
* Give a link keyboard focus
The target URL will remain in the location bar indefinately. After 5 to 15 seconds, the target URL should be hidden. It'd be nice if this delay were user configurable (or at least easily modified by an extension), but not necessary.
Also, once the target is hidden again, moving the cursor should not immediately show the hovered link again.
Reproducible: Always

Well, I'd argue that persistently showing a 'random' URL in the location bar is equally, if not more, annoying and distracting.
Yes, the fade-out will probably catch the eye. However, if the URL is there, it will catch the eye every time you glance up. One of the desirable points of putting it in the location bar was that it was supposed to be eye catching. It just needs to be eye catching when appropriate.
Maybe a longer transition would help reduce the distraction of the fade-out. For example, a 10 second delay and a 5 second fade-out.

(In reply to comment #3)
> I think the visual noise of the change would be distracting.
Possibly, but I'm not sure it'll be good to have the idle state have the hover effect on. Example case: say a user with a touchpad leaves the cursor on a link then types or something. I'd prefer that when they eventually look back up at the location bar it's only showing the current location, as they no longer are hovering intently, i.e. the cursor was just left wherever it happened to be.
Of course, you could also argue that it should always show the hover link to indicate what the click of the button will do. So, both sides have merit.
(In reply to comment #4)
> Maybe a longer transition would help reduce the distraction of the fade-out.
> For example, a 10 second delay and a 5 second fade-out.
Makes some sense, but I have a feeling that in practice this wouldn't be ideal. Longer gradual animations are probably not a good idea, but that's just my feeling.

(In reply to comment #5)
> ...
>
> Of course, you could also argue that it should always show the hover link to
> indicate what the click of the button will do. So, both sides have merit.
That's why I suggested this be configurable.
i.e. -1 or 0 for a delay would never clear it from the location bar.